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The Case for Clinician-First Healthcare | Freed CEO Erez Druk
39 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, we’re joined by Erez Druk, founder and CEO of Freed, to explore what happens when healthcare technology is built for clinicians: not hospitals, payers, or administrators.
Erez shares the lessons from his first startup, why “who you build for” is the most important decision a founder can make, and how watching physician burnout up close through his wife and close friends in medicine led to the creation of Freed. We dive into why clinician burnout is a structural problem, how misaligned incentives and system complexity drive doctors out of medicine, and why AI may be one of the few tools capable of absorbing the complexity humans shouldn’t have to carry. The conversation also covers product-led growth in healthcare, building technology clinicians actually love, and what a truly clinician-first healthcare system could look like over the next decade.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Healthcare Theory Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Healthcare Theory Podcast. I'm your host, Nikhil Reddy, and every week we interview the entrepreneurs and thought leaders behind the future of healthcare care to see what's gone wrong with our system and how we can fix it.
00:00:14
Speaker
And today's guest on the healthcare care theory is Erez Druk, the founder and CEO of Freed, which is an AI platform that's basically rethinking how clinicians work, and not just how they document.
00:00:25
Speaker
And while Freed is first known for its AI scribe, the bigger vision that Erez talks about today is how to build and how his team is building an end-to-end clinical system that helps doctors before, during, and after the visit.
Erez Druk's Journey to Founding Freed
00:00:38
Speaker
And as he addresses his clinical burnout problem, in this episode, we talk about how he's achieving product-led growth and building the best AI platform he can that's clinician-first and helps patients in the long run.
00:00:51
Speaker
So hi, Rez. Thank you for coming on today. Welcome to The Healthcare care Theory. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Of course. I'm super excited to get into this, but I want to start off with your first venture. I know startups, it's super high risk, high reward. Not everything goes great in the first try. And I know you also had a first venture that um went a little differently than you might have expected.
00:01:11
Speaker
I'd love to hear a bit of more about that. What were the key lessons you took away from that? And how did that set the stage for what you're doing now with Freed and finding that new problem set? Yes. So I spent half a decade of my life working on my first startup called Urban Leap. We had a, so this was in the government space. We built a procurement platform for local governments. will We were off to a very strong start. So we had a little product product that we got some of the biggest cities in the U.S. had to purchase and use.
00:01:45
Speaker
a But the product product market fit wasn't really in terms of delivering a lot of value. And again, won't go into the entire story. We had a few pivots um and ultimately got to a product that did deliver a lot of value.
00:01:59
Speaker
But it
Key Lessons and Strategies from Urban Leap to Freed
00:02:00
Speaker
was hard to scale. And after five years, decided that you know this is not becoming the big dream that we had and ran a bit out of steam, to be honest, and decided to shut down and move on.
00:02:12
Speaker
um And that was was painful, but i did I did fall in love with startups. So literally next morning I was, oh my God, what's the next full of motivation to find the next thing. And that's what led to to freedom.
00:02:25
Speaker
Your question was what I learned from that experience. So I'll answer that. ah Really, there's you learn so much doing something hard for five years that ah there's so many learnings.
00:02:41
Speaker
I would say the top three are very clear in my mind and most influenced three, so I'll cover those three really quickly. By far, the first one is who are you building for? it the of the what you're building exists for the purpose of delivering value to someone and choosing who that is, is the number one decision because you're going to be serving them for a long time.
00:03:05
Speaker
In my first startup, that was public servants, which are great. And I was very interested in them intellectually, but I didn't have the love and passion for them. And ultimately, I would say the right to build something amazing for them because i just didn't know them that well.
00:03:21
Speaker
In contrast, at Freed, the user is my wife, Gabby, who's a fairly medicine doctor, lots of our friends. I love these people. I could serve them for the next hundred years and and that would be a good purpose in my life.
00:03:34
Speaker
And the fact that you know someone very deeply and understand them and know the nuance of their lives gives you so much sense of bigger chance to build something that truly is life changing for them. So number one, who you're building for, very you know fundamental fundamental decision.
Product-Led Growth and Addressing Clinician Needs
00:03:50
Speaker
And number two is speed. So I like to say that the right speed for startup is faster. I truly believe in this. I think UrbanLip had a chance of being successful if we made decisions faster. We could have moved yeah and an order of magnitude of 2, 3x faster if we really knew, you know if we were obsessed about it. um Speed really matters, especially now that the world is moving 3, 4x faster than than before.
00:04:18
Speaker
Everything you build, you have 10 competitors coming out right away. So speed is just, you can't move too fast. I really truly believe in that. And number three, and before I spend the entire conversation here, the last one is that The number one thing you need to do is build something that delivers real value.
00:04:34
Speaker
um But go to market is not an afterthought, because if you build it and you don't know how to this get it to the hands of the people you're trying to serve, it has no value. So really thinking pretty early on, having at least a thesis, how would this grow and how do i get it to the end of people um trying different things and not just build something in a silo for a year and then just to discover that You can get anybody to use it.
Addressing Clinician Burnout with AI Solutions
00:04:58
Speaker
um Really go together. The product, the go-to-market, it's a kind of cyclical. it's you know they They really go hand-in hand in hand.
00:05:04
Speaker
um And again, that's really influenced Freed. Well, very early on, we decided to go direct to clinician, PLG, product-led growth, which is um pretty much never happened in healthcare at this scale with the kind of real clinical product.
00:05:20
Speaker
a So those are the three three learnings and ah hopefully they'll make Frida slightly more successful than than my first venture. course. Yeah. I think that's, I really appreciate that. It's really exciting. I think of course, speed is super important, your ability to iterate, but a lot of the other two, I mean, providing value and building for someone you care about all centers around, yeah, of course, the person you're building, you're building for.
00:05:43
Speaker
And i mean, with your product, you're building for clinicians. And I'd love to hear that story of you finding about out about this problem. I mean, clinician burnout is a huge thing that we hear about, but Oftentimes you don't hear about it from the news. You hear about it from like your loved ones or people that you know immediately. And I left them in, yeah, what did that story look like? And what were those initial conversations that like like helped you learn more about the clinician burnout problem?
00:06:05
Speaker
Yes. So... So already mentioned my wife, Gabby. She's the most important part of this story in my life. ah So Gabby is a family medicine doctor and we met eight years ago, just before Gabby started med school.
00:06:20
Speaker
So I like to say we had a short moment in time to fall in love before life became a and disaster. ah But more seriously, this this experience, I got sucked into the world of clinicians and I got to see how on one hand, these are really the most wonderful, selfless people in the world. Not only my wife, but all our friends from med school. And um they're truly doing it for a purpose, for the purpose of serving others.
00:06:46
Speaker
And on the flip side, I got to see it's very obvious how we take them, put them in the healthcare system and squeeze this all out of them. Yeah. to the extent that everybody's burnt out, quitting in messes, telling their kids, you can do anything in life, but you're not going to be a doctor.
00:06:59
Speaker
um One way that I saw this, so during med school, it was COVID. And and you know I really saw every single one of our good friends in med school like in tears multiple times, not because of just the mental burden of seeing people dying, which of course is tragic, but just like the load of having no time, no control, you know you and then you have to work on all this administrative work. um so you know For years, i saw that and heard my wife Gabby say, I have notes to do every single day. um And yeah, really learned to appreciate that this is not only documentation, but the all the administrative work they have to be chasing all the time. Really, it's like a cloud over their
Systemic Issues in Healthcare and AI's Role
00:07:48
Speaker
lives. They never have time for themselves.
00:07:51
Speaker
for the loved ones. um So that's kind of how I got to experience that, seeing that and of ah ultimately three years ago, decided that, hey, maybe maybe maybe I can ah you know create something that their helps alleviate that ah it's very, very real burnout.
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah. And it's kind of like almost surprising, to be honest, because when you go to the doctor's office, you have someone you go to, they help you with that your insurance, getting the appointment scheduled. And when you're with the doctor, you're only with the doctor in regards to your medical health or whatever their issue you're there for.
00:08:25
Speaker
So from our perspective, you only really see the doctor in like a medical setting. But oftentimes, doctors are spending a lot of time, and as you mentioned, like administrative tasks and other things that just bog down the amount of time they have with patients.
00:08:37
Speaker
But I mean, why do you think that exists? Like what's the system level like cause or thing that's creating this crisis? Because at firsthand, it seems like, i mean, ah other people and other admin can take care of this, but of course it's not exactly, it's nowhere near as easy as that.
00:08:52
Speaker
Right. You know, when we started Freed, we ran some ads on Facebook and some clinician, uh, posted a selfie of himself, uh, in the hut, in his hot tub he said and he's smiling and saying, um, use freed. It's only 99 dollars a month. week We don't know this person. We never paid him. It's the best thing that ever happened to me.
00:09:17
Speaker
It's the first time in two years that I'm using my hot tub because i have time for myself. Um, uh, so really trying to hammer in the point they have no time, not not not for the patient, not for the ancestor, not for i their families. And yeah, I think ultimately, if I understood correctly, the reason is, why is that the case? um Yeah, I think so. Healthcare is not inherently, but it's so complex it's getting more complex complex over time with more systems, you know very fragmented, um a just more and more regulation, more compliance. And so i think it's just getting very complex to the point that we have seven to eight administrators for every single provider yeah and they are still burnt out.
Founding Principles and Growth Strategies of Freed
00:10:05
Speaker
um Yeah, i think inherently this is, if I try to think about it from first principles, it's a it's an incentives problem um because we have such a fragmented system and not like, for example, a one-payer um system like we have back in Israel.
00:10:23
Speaker
Then we have different insurances and different providers and everybody are just like, it's it's an arms race. how How does the insurance pay the least reimbursement for the providers? How do they get as much as they can to for the care they provide.
00:10:39
Speaker
um And again, this is just one example of a system that has their own incentives and very fragmented, and that just creates you know really a compounding complexity, inefficiency.
00:10:51
Speaker
And I really believe for the first time we have this amazing thing called AI that can really combat that in a way that it can actually reverse the complexity or handle the complexity form for humans and bring a lot of efficiency and happiness happiness and better healthcare.
00:11:08
Speaker
um But to answer the question, I believe it's the at the core, just misaligned incentives on the system level that you can really see how those compound into just a big, big big big messy yeah healthcare your system. And we all know this will pay in 2x more than any US state country in the US to get worse health outcomes. So yeah, it's pretty pretty bad.
00:11:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of funny. Like when people talk about the healthcare system here, we don't really have a healthcare system. We have like a patchwork of systems and it's, you bring up like multi single payer examples. I mean, we could have had that, but it was like 1950s when the U.S. proposed like single payer, a single payer system, but it was actually doctors that strike this down because they didn't want too much government and intervention in their healthcare.
00:11:52
Speaker
it's like, there's almost like no perfect, solution from a policy level, which makes it really hard to solve from that angle. And of course, Freed is taking a really interesting approach using software, using technology um that allows you to work with the doctors. So, I mean, you had this idea of the problem, right? A million workflows for doctors to deal with. um And you started with Ascribe as a pivot kind of kind of pivot point to tackle the rest of these workflows.
00:12:15
Speaker
But I'd love if you could walk us through, like, what were the, as you mentioned, first principles you had when designing the solution? And what did that look like reaching out to these doctors and building something that actually worked for them? Cause I know each of them have like different use cases and different things they're trying to solve.
00:12:32
Speaker
Yeah. It's a good question. so I think the, um, So for me, the birth moment of Freed before we even build anything was it was almost three years. So it was January 5th of 2023, I guess. Yes. um And I just had this insight. I wrote this document. It was called Building for Doctors. Now it's a bit more for clinicians.
00:12:58
Speaker
And with the principles, well, very simple. That's that just focus just on the clinician. We're only going to provide value for them and kind of ignore the entire healthcare system. Just what do these important people need?
00:13:11
Speaker
um We'll find you know the biggest pain point that we they have, solve it in a way that really diverses value and everything will follow from there. not even going to worry about monetization or how to integrate, nothing. Let's let's just deliver a value for them for their biggest problem.
00:13:28
Speaker
um a And this is really was the insight that led to everything from there. It was same day. I knew already the documentation, some, you know, very simple demo called a couple of a friend of ours to come was a doctor to come and kind of look at my first kind of chat GPT demo.
00:13:47
Speaker
Um, and, and I swear that day I knew it's going work because when I showed her this patchwork of, I'll give you context. We recorded a simulated patient visit with her.
00:14:00
Speaker
I dragged it to some website to do a transcription. and then i prepared a few, a few prompts in chat GPT to write a note. And I showed this to her and I saw, I could see the the spark in her eyes.
00:14:14
Speaker
yeah oh my God, we can, and the next day, when can I use it? It it was so clear that it's a, it's a, it was a true wow moment. Um, and then from there,
00:14:25
Speaker
So that obsession with the clinician was there. And really, it was very simple. It was, hey, let's solve this problem in the best possible way. Let's make it insanely simple. They don't want to learn anything. They don't want training. They don't want to configure anything. And that wouldn't change with clinicians. Not because they can, because, they again, we're trying to take burden off of their minds.
00:14:47
Speaker
Not more. And three, let's make it...
Expanding Freed's Product Capabilities
00:14:51
Speaker
as it is humanly possible to access. So very early very early, we had beta for free online, just use it um so we can learn and deliver the value as best as possible.
00:15:02
Speaker
um yeah So those are some of the principles that still guide everything we build free, solve real problem, make sure it's a good solution, make it insanely simple and ah and accessible.
00:15:14
Speaker
And I would say even in a complex system like healthcare, kind of physics and first principles win. If you really provide true value for a real pain point, for real human, they would find a way to use it right? Like everybody wants their problems solved. um And the one thing I would add, not to kind of take too much credit, we are very lucky to have this amazing technology that made all of that suddenly possible for the first time.
00:15:41
Speaker
um So yeah, so that's the those are the principles that guide us. Yeah, I definitely I definitely like empathize with that. And also, i mean, before we get into the actual product you guys are doing, one thing you kind of mentioned and hinted at a bit here is that in a lot of health care startups, they build for like payers or large conglomerates like hospitals.
00:16:01
Speaker
And that requires like a lot of implementation times. It's super. They really build niche solutions that are configurable. um But I mean, product-led growth, what you guys are pursuing is basically almost like unheard of in healthcare, whether it's like KIPAA or yeah EHRs or integrations like that. it's It's super hard to do self-serve. But of course, you guys have been able to build that out targeting like smaller medium-sized practices. But I'd love if you could walk through like, how did you make like product-led growth actually work in this sector when most startups aren't able to do it? And what were some of the decisions and constraints you had to like kind of go about when
00:16:33
Speaker
making this self-ser like truly possible self-service like truly possible for them. Yeah. It's interesting question. yeah I can't say in retrospect, everything is like a perfect story. I can't say we went in like, we're going to make product that growth work in healthcare. It was much more, i see it as a result of this, what I said earlier of like building like this really obsession about the clinician because with that,
00:16:58
Speaker
The only focus was, hey, let's build something great for them. OK, now let's put it in their hands as fast as possible. um it was very natural to something I've done in the first few days was posting on Reddit and having a landing page and try to see if people are interested. So it was very natural to go directly to your user versus let me spend a year and a half speaking to a big health system and talking to all the administrators there.
00:17:22
Speaker
I'll even tell you a story once Frid was getting some traction. Yeah. um I got a call from Kaiser. Kaiser was assessing the big health system here, which I'm sure everybody is aware of.
00:17:36
Speaker
And they were assessing scribe solutions and they heard about Frid and wanted to test it. And it was so funny. We were a team of or three at the time. And it's me. on a call with like nine people in the innovation arm of Kaiser. I'm like, what's what's ah what's happening? Just try the product and tell me what you think.
00:17:55
Speaker
And ultimately, they didn't move forward with us. By the way, don't blame them. They have, you know, those systems, those big enterprises work in different ways. but you know, they asked 13 questions, starting from security to compliance, which all important.
00:18:10
Speaker
But the last one was, Do clinicians actually love that? too Is it useful for them? So the kind of priorities in big systems are different. So for us, the more direct we can, the more direct relationship we can have with our users, the better product we can build and It's just simpler. It's simpler if you can make it work.
00:18:30
Speaker
And again, I think the reason it worked is because of of timing and this obsession about making a product really just focusing only on the user and making it work amazing for them. In in the early days, me and my co-founder, Andre, would iterate on the product based on feedback multiple times a day. We're just like changing the prompts and improving it. So...
00:18:53
Speaker
um Yeah, but it's a timing was a big factor today. There's probably no chance to launch a new scribe and do PLG with that specific product
Creating a Comprehensive AI Assistant for Clinicians
00:19:02
Speaker
anymore. Yeah. And I think like, I think it's definitely the market in scribe cities is like kind of changed quite a bit. i mean, now you can see like find way more scribes online. And of course, like doctors have access to a lot more tools than they had before. But mean, you guys weren't always planning to be a scribe from what I know. mean, now you have a lot more products beyond that. So I'd love to hear like, what is like the bigger vision behind like Freed, I guess, like, it's not just like, it's not just a scribe, but it's like like a clinical operating system I see.
00:19:28
Speaker
um So what does that look like and why? what is like the value in having more than just like a single note-taking tool? and like, what does it actually look like for our clinicians? Yeah. So the way I think about it is, so you you always want to start with value form for your users and customers.
00:19:49
Speaker
And if I look at a clinician's date and the clinic as a whole, the commentation is this one big, very big pain point that Frid is now solving and other scribes, as you mentioned.
00:20:01
Speaker
And around it, there's a cloud of many, many other tasks that are also extremely annoying and inefficient and costly. So anything from scheduling patients to placing a referral, to placing a prescription, to every single thing is hard and complicated and time consuming.
00:20:20
Speaker
And this is a list of, i mean, truly hundreds of different preauthorization. there There's so many. Um, and for me, it's clear that every single one, every moment like this in, ah in, in healthcare will benefit from useful, the right, useful, smart AI to make it either fully automated or make it better or make it a little easier depending on the test.
00:20:44
Speaker
Um, So really for me, the vision is I look at this cloud of tests and I want free to check all of them. So it's really the assistant that can do anything for you, proactively, smartly, quickly.
00:20:55
Speaker
So you're truly free to just come into the room, you know spend time with your patient, go home and the last patient goes home. um So that's that's kind of the big vision and what we do today. So today we're much more than a scribe. We help clinicians.
00:21:10
Speaker
I like to think about it before, during and after the visit. So before the visit, We give the patient just the information they need about the patient to be prepared and have a great visit.
00:21:21
Speaker
They can ask, free as a chat, for the system questions about the patient. During the visit, we, of course, capture the visit, create a documentation, give you clinical insights.
00:21:36
Speaker
And then after that, we had close as many of the tests. So we created documentation, but also the patient instructions and the billing codes and as many artifacts as possible. And now we also push to most HRs. We can push that and get the work really done. um So really expanding along the workflow.
00:21:54
Speaker
So that's what phase is there. we'll see it as more than a scribe. It's true kind of a AI clinician assistant. And then now we're starting to work more on clinic workflows. So helping with the...
00:22:05
Speaker
front desk. So voice AI is amazing now. We can help answer phones faster. AI as always can always be empathetic, so save a lot of time. And also the back office, some of those back office billing cycles. So we're getting into those as well.
00:22:19
Speaker
um Unfortunately for clinics, but fortunately for us, there are so many it's tests like this. We just need to you know go and crack and build build the best product to solve them.
00:22:29
Speaker
The hard thing is to still make it very simple. And this is again, where AI can really can do a lot for the clinician and clinic without becoming another clunky EHR. And that's really the entire premise. How do we build something that an autonomous operating system that is extremely simple and delightful to use um and really does a great job for for those clinics, that's that's that's where where we're headed.
00:22:53
Speaker
Of course, and I think it's going really exciting because there's like so many different things they have to actually get automated. And of course, like with enough tool sets, you can probably do a lot of that all in like one the kind of consecutive fashion, which could be really nice. and But when you're making these like products, of course, there's certain priorities you need to have. like You can't do everything at once. You can't burn the ocean, really.
00:23:12
Speaker
um And in terms of that, like, how do you get like, what does the feedback look like from clinicians and how you decide, like, what is the next best step? Because of course, like yourself, you're not a clinician, you're often like not embedding these workflows, but you're talking to people that have been.
00:23:25
Speaker
um So how do you know what prior product to prioritize and what the roadmap might look like in the future for free? Yeah, it's a good question. i think this is always everything related to product is is both art and science. so I can tell you, I just spend went to Israel recently and for the first time unplugged for little bit and actually came back, reviving, kind of changing our strategy quite a bit.
00:23:48
Speaker
um
Balancing Innovation and Customer Feedback
00:23:50
Speaker
The way I view it right now is with our current product and we to keep expanding it and we're doing that and improving it. yeah You have to do to do that. But then basically we're placing kind of concentrated bets that try to do three things at the same time.
00:24:05
Speaker
A good strategy is a strategy that is both focused, but yeah so that's these three things. One is we're looking to create net new value for our customers or really go and create more real wow moments. So for example, if today,
00:24:21
Speaker
I make our scribe a little better, which we do that. That's an improvement. That's an improvement. You do that, but it's not like a net new, oh, wow, you can actually right yeah create an AI receptionist for us.
00:24:32
Speaker
So that's one. Number two, the impact you have on the world is is bounded by how strong and big and and honestly lucrative your business is. So make sure that what we build is also...
00:24:43
Speaker
moves business fundamentals. So I want to create so much value for our customers that they would happily pay us more because it's worth it for them. And we always price fairly and you know pretty cheaply, but I have to create so much value that it moves business fundamentals.
00:24:58
Speaker
Yeah. And number three, it has to get us closer to this strategic position with clinics where we have access to all the tests and we can really start, honestly start chewing it showing into what the EHR is doing and really kind of take over and power power everything for them.
00:25:15
Speaker
a So that's how we think how I think about hey what's a great strategy, the kind of concentrated bets that do all of this thing. And for example, as I mentioned, one of our bets right now is really around it the front desk. How can we help with all those communications? And this is you know a big pain point for clinics and patients.
00:25:32
Speaker
um So that's how we prioritize. Big picture. In the day to day, get feedback. We see what ClinShare is telling us, what they're suffering. And we also do a lot of the small incremental, small features as as well that improve the product.
00:25:46
Speaker
And you have to balance those big bets with the obvious things that you have to constantly improve. and Yeah, so that's a bit of the philosophy, but it truly is ah science in and out. Something is just to take up breath and think about it and you know build some conviction.
00:26:02
Speaker
So it's a yeah, I don't think there's a perfect recipe for product strategy and prioritization. Yeah, I'm sure yeah yeah it's not like you can assign a score to every little product you guys want to build out. I mean, everything is like, certain things can change in like the atmosphere or just like within your own roadmap internally, which change things a lot. But I think it probably helps that like you guys have a pretty big set of customers now that yeah you're serving single people. A lot of them can provide feedback. Even if a lot of them don't, it's not a huge issue.
00:26:30
Speaker
um But one thing I'm curious about is like, reaching that many customers of course not that easy, especially, um i mean, of course it's, it's very different from going B2B. I mean, even though you guys technically are, um it's like, you're kind of selling to individual people, the doctors themselves, the clinicians themselves.
00:26:45
Speaker
So what did that look like? I feel like that must've been very difficult and, but also very rewarding at the same time when you're actually getting your product in the hands of the people you're working with.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah. So, so we truly had a, So when we launched free to beta and then GPT-4 came out and um i couldn't believe it, but every week was like, we had like, we grew two eggs from the first week. So I still remember it was around March where we had the first clinician using us on real patient.
00:27:19
Speaker
And then the next week we had a handful and then 10 and then 20. And then really grew to accept week over week to the extent that we couldn't find enough ai capacity. And it was like breaking and people are relying on it. It it was really crazy, really fast. Yeah. and And what I'm trying to describe here, it was it was a lightning battle moment. Like we didn't intend for that to be that way and then happen this way.
00:27:44
Speaker
um And we just made a few simple things, which was the core product, the, I would leave like the messaging and how we, we give people access to it.
00:27:55
Speaker
And from there, it was quite viral the early days. Um, and I'm trying to remember what, what exact, what the exact question was. um but yeah, it was.
00:28:07
Speaker
It was like, it is, I guess like, I guess it is interesting that like, of course you have like this variety, but like, how do you keep that going? Cause I mean, part of that's maybe a little accidental part of that. I mean, of course it's looking great for the company, but you want to have something like sustained growth for the product.
00:28:21
Speaker
Maybe that's like word to mouth. Once you build this variety, you have this like snowball, like how do you keep that accumulating, get it like, get into like an avalanche of growth for your team? Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a ton of things. Once your product market fit, like product that walks in the market, you, you,
00:28:37
Speaker
You actually need to start doing a lot of things well. you need to do better marketing and maybe some branding and have like a better website and have a referral program so people can tell others. So once you have something working, there's like ton of small and big levers you could you could
Purpose-Driven Team and Culture at Freed
00:28:51
Speaker
use.
00:28:51
Speaker
um And like an example, pretty early on, we got into one of the more popular podcasts and got us a lot there and that got us a lot of growth. You know, we didn't have to do it, but that, so those are the things that,
00:29:03
Speaker
you can do to maximize your growth. a But yeah I would definitely say that the way to keep the lightning in a battle, those S-curves always diminish at some point, especially as the world moves so fast. We have a billion competitors now.
00:29:20
Speaker
um You kind of have, I mean, it sounds basic, but you have to keep innovating. You have to yeah understand what technology is going, what are your customers need next and keep you know, keep capturing like in a battle moments.
00:29:35
Speaker
um And that's how great companies are built, not by doing one thing very well and writing it, but doing one thing really well, writing it and using that momentum to do the next three things.
00:29:46
Speaker
a Again, Amazon started as a bookstore, then other stores, suddenly they do AWS, which is how it's even related. So yeah, I think you have to
00:29:57
Speaker
Over time, whatever you build becomes less differentiated and unique in the world. and if you don't have something unique in the world, then your time is... a your time is a the the the clock is ticking.
00:30:10
Speaker
um And yeah, I think this is honestly one of our biggest challenges as a company that does something that works so well to innovate again and again, invest in other areas. That's a muscle you have to build and maintain.
00:30:26
Speaker
Yeah, and like I kind of want to talk about that because it's not... easy and it's not something you can really force, for example. like You can build a roadmap, but what other competitors do, what you might have to do to innovate or stay competing in the market isn't exactly clear. And I think part of that comes from like having a great team, great talent around you.
00:30:41
Speaker
um i mean, your first product, it went pretty well. And then, of course, this is going really great with Freed. But when you're thinking about like building a team, building a team that like has different ideas, different interests, different perspectives to get a good product going, and get a lot of innovation, what is your philosophy on that? like Hiring well and I'm building a team that kind of works for you. What does that look like so far with Freed? How's that story been?
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's, that's a big topic. I love my team We have the seven, we call them Freedos Um, um couldn't be, just had a meeting with my leadership team. I told them, it's my birthday dam ah today. And I told them. Oh really? Happy birthday.
00:31:20
Speaker
Thank you. I couldn't be luckier to be building this such a meaningful product that clinicians tell us change our lives. with this amazing team. It's it's it's literally my life my life dream. um And you can't do it without a team. And the number one input is the people. So, yeah, I think, I mean, there's no hacks around it. think you need to have really high bar, spend a lot of time on hiring. um You actually need to be good at do something about people who don't work out fast. That's another piece of it. um But yeah, know what you're looking for.
00:31:56
Speaker
spend energy on finding these people. i think the last thing is it's it's much, much easier if you have something that really matters in the world. Like people, most people, definitely great people, they are purpose-driven. They want the money, they want the outcome, they want you know everything that we all do.
00:32:12
Speaker
um But having something that really, like something I do a lot that helps us close the best, really good candidates is I send a video of some of our customers and like, if that doesn't trigger an emotion, like a mom saying,
00:32:26
Speaker
Thank you, Freed, as a provider, as a as a wife and as a mom. you know If that doesn't move something in you and makes you join Freed versus some you know maybe some random startup, um then maybe it's not the place for you. So I think purpose is a is really drives really drives people.
00:32:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's like also, don't want to be purpose-driven, but i think something to look for is also being mission-driven too. Like, yeah you want to have a purpose, whether that's a money or whatever it might be, that's that's fine. But I think like, what I love about healthcare care is that people are naturally a bit more mission-driven. They care about improving the lives of patients, providers, and the people who work so hard to make healthcare work, um which is a definitely yeah definitely a difficult thing to do. 100%. that's my that's what I mean by purpose, like having something that matters and really makes the world better. So ah and people are truly...
00:33:19
Speaker
you know i mentioned it's my birthday it's like and you know like life goes by pretty really quickly you better do something useful to the world with your time yeah and it's like it's just yeah it's a very interesting thing because of course not everyone like finds that at the same time but um when you build a team of people that already care about one thing it it just goes really well but um and i kind of want to think about that mean with competition like there's a lot of other teams that are working towards this problem working really hard, have great founders. um But you guys have kind of set yourself apart, have had a lot of growth. And what do you think that looks like? I mean, of course, like across this competitive landscape, like how do you stand out and kind of show doctors that you're the ones that have maybe not just like the best tool, but the best tool for them and their use case and for their long-term goals?
00:34:03
Speaker
Yeah. So there are few aspects to it. One thing we still hear from clinicians, we see lot of clinicians living through And then they come back and saying, Oh, actually, I understand why free this better. So with AI, it's very interesting. All the products look kind of the same. Yeah.
00:34:20
Speaker
So imagine that you have two personal assistants, okay? And until you ask them both the same question and see what comes out, you don't know which one is like you know the more like effective, intelligent, proactive until you work with them. So AI is kind of like that until you use it and see the output and see how different it's like actually have pretty hard to assess how intelligent it is.
00:34:41
Speaker
So number one, It's still very hard to build a scribe that is highly accurate and reliable and useful and does what what you need and is customizable.
Freed's Vision for the Future of Healthcare AI
00:34:51
Speaker
So that's an edge that we have today that wouldn't be forever. This is not like a forever edge, but this it does matter. From from there, I think the second thing is what we just discussed, which is how do we keep, know, lightning in a bottle moments and it finishes more and more. So it always becomes, you know, every month, every quarter that you use, it's like, oh my God, Frit can now do my pinning codes. Oh my God, Frit is now proactively preparing me for my visits.
00:35:20
Speaker
So you have to kind of stay ahead of that and just build that the richest, most useful product out there. Yeah, I think number three is, you know i don't want call it brand, but being more than just a product, like a company that takes good care of My dream for Fred is actually to build the most loved clinician brand in the world. ah Because I think that's almost like the hardest achievement. If you create something that people love, it's more than just creating a good product. So having amazing support, taking good care of our users when things go, you know, don't go well, um doing more of for them outside of the product and really just create, you know, like a company is like an entity in the world that can have
00:36:02
Speaker
good and useful personality that people care about or can just be like a thing that sucks money out of people. So definitely want us to have this, ah you know, kind of high purposeful brand that ah that that resonates with clinicians. um Yeah. And there would be other players who build good products here and healthcare is the largest industry in the US. So not worried about that.
00:36:25
Speaker
um We just have to over do our own thing, you know, at the world-class level. Yeah. And it it is like ah a very thing. It's interesting thing. Cause of course, like brand, a brand to like a lot of extent is important because doctors like the loyalty doesn't really exist in healthcare care the way it does in other products. and i think getting people to love your product because it's actually good um just sets you apart a lot. And I'm, I'm very excited to see them like the future of Freed and we'll love just hear really quick. I mean, before,
00:36:51
Speaker
In the next like five, 10 years, of course, like we don't even know where AI will be in the next five to 10 years, but with Freed, what are you kind of envisioning in terms of where you hope things will go? What is the long-term vision for Freed's role and how we like kind of transform clinicians' workflows and what it is like to be a physician? like What do you think is the long-term goal for Freed?
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah. 10 years, the world is definitely going to be interesting. yeah a So that's how to predict. Yeah. So I view AI as, think intelligence in the right is the right way to look at it And I imagine being for the clinician and the clinic and the patient, um really an all all powerful assistant. So it's this thing that is with you, whether it's in your, you know,
00:37:39
Speaker
glasses or your phone, it's like everywhere. and it's like right practical it can do all your tests for you. It probably knows, hey, you're headed to clinic now. Here's what you need to know about your first patient. It prepares everything for you. It does everything for you. It's like like true the the best assistant you can imagine in the world. Only that it never gets tired. It's always there. It's empathetic. It learns all the time.
00:38:00
Speaker
It's like a super, super, super assistant. yeah And the outcome of that is that clinicians, doctors do what they sign up for, which is, hey, I'm taking care of patients.
00:38:13
Speaker
And that's pretty much that's pretty much it. And I enjoy it. Clinics are much more efficient and thriving, you know, getting paid adequately for what they do, um which means that A few things happen. There's more access. I think the access we have to healthcare in the US today, it can be one hundred x more. It will still not be enough. you know I don't even try to to go to my doctor unless something really bad happens.
00:38:41
Speaker
um It will reverse the trend of small clinics kind of disappearing and becoming big systems. Nothing in big system, but we need small local clinics as well. um And really on the macro level, I think this is the only way in this foreseeable future to reduce health care costs, make the system, you know kind of start making it better over time.
00:39:04
Speaker
um So that's that's how how I see things evolve in the next few years here. And again, not only thanks to Freed, but all the amazing startups and companies, as you mentioned, amazing founders are building in this space.
00:39:17
Speaker
You know, as many brains as we and as many brains and tokens as we can to to make healthcare yeah better for everyone.
Conclusion and Additional Resources
00:39:25
Speaker
Of course, yeah. And I think like, um of course, with like Freed, for example, going to hopefully increase supply in healthcare, like maybe decrease consolidation a little bit and that'll decrease costs long-term. So it's super exciting. of course It seems like Freed is is unique in the so far from my experience that like there's a very directed it' like kind of mission and there's a very directed people you're building for.
00:39:45
Speaker
And a kind of a passion for that. That's like throughout the company. So really enjoy like having you on today. whereas I think it's like super cool to see what you guys are doing. And I'm excited to see what products come out in the future. um Clinicians are kind of like the backbone of our healthcare system. So the more we can do for them so they can do more for others is um going to be super important. So I really appreciate you coming on and and thanks for thanks for your time.
00:40:07
Speaker
Thank you. And I couldn't say it better. Clinicians are it the heart of everything in healthcare. So the yeah taking care of the heart is what what we need to do now. ah Thank you. appreciate what you do. And ah and thank you for it having me.
00:40:20
Speaker
Of course. Thanks for listening to The Healthcare Theory. Every Tuesday, expect a new episode on the platform of your choice. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, any streaming platform you can imagine.
00:40:34
Speaker
We'll also be posting more short-form educational content on Instagram and TikTok. And if you really want to learn more about what's gone wrong with healthcare care and how you can help, check out our blog at thehealthcaretheory.org.
00:40:46
Speaker
Repeat, thehealthcaretheory.org. Again, i appreciate you tuning in and I hope to see you again soon.